Guantanamo Inmate Database: Abu Mohammed

TIRANA, Albania — On the night the soldiers came for him,
Algerian-born Abu Mohammed said, he was resting at home with his
pregnant wife and five children.

The soldiers knocked on the door of the apartment of the
schoolteacher and former doctor, he said, and showed him a list of the
men they were looking for. The address for his building was on the
list, but his name was not. As they turned to leave, he asked the
soldiers what they needed, but was told it was none of his concern, he
said.

Fifteen minutes later, he said, they returned. This time, he said,
they asked whether they could look through his apartment. He remembers
thinking he had nothing to hide, so he stepped aside. The soldiers
handcuffed him, saying it was procedure, and looked through the house,
searching for documents.

When they were finished, he said, they uncuffed him, apologized for
the inconvenience and departed. It wasn't until the third time they
came that night that they asked him to accompany them to a nearby
office, to answer questions.

"I did not like to leave my family at night, but knew in my heart I
had done nothing wrong, and I was not on their list — they showed it to
me — so I knew I had nothing to fear," Mohammed said.

That was May 26, 2002, in Peshawar, Pakistan. To this day, he hasn't
seen his wife and six children again. To this day, he said, he has no
idea why he was taken away that night or why he then was told he was
being taken home but instead was shackled, then flown to a U.S. prison
in Bagram, Afghanistan. Or why, after two months there, he was told
that he was being taken home to his family but instead was flown to
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, half a world away, where he was kept locked up
for four more years, including 18 months after he was told that he was,
in effect, innocent of charges that he says were never fully
articulated.

So why was he arrested? At a tribunal in Guantanamo, he was charged
with being a member of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, of leaving
Yemen for Afghanistan at the request of al Qaida. They said that once
he was in the area, he helped recruit fighters to defend Islam in
Afghanistan. Beyond simply dismissing such charges as laughable, Abu
Mohammed said he doubted that these could really be the reasons he was
picked up.

The Islamic Salvation Front formed after he left Algeria in 1989,
and in any case he said he was never a member. He said that he'd worked
as a doctor for a nongovernmental organization in Afghanistan until
1992. It would have been easy to find out that he hadn't been back
since, he said, and that he'd been working for and with the United
Nations and Red Crescent, the Islamic-nations version of the Red Cross,
from that point on.

From 1996 to 2002, Mohammed's medical license and passport needed to
be renewed, but he said he'd refused to return to Algeria and instead
lived in a United Nations refugee camp in Pakistan. There, he taught
math and Arabic in a Red Crescent-sponsored school. In both situations,
there were multiple witnesses to his presence and many sign-in
documents, none of which was brought before the tribunal, according to
the official record. In fact, Mohammed claims that although United
Nations workers could have vouched for his presence in Pakistan — and,
according to his attorney, spent years working for his release — U.S.
officials refused to listen to them. In the end, Mohammed boycotted his
own hearing because he thought it was a sham.

During four and a half years of detention — both in Afghanistan,
where he was made to stand for hours with his hands cuffed high above
him, and in Cuba, where the punishment was far more psychologically
than physically challenging, he said — he was asked questions about
Algeria, the country of his birth, he said.

"I told them, 'I have not been in Algeria for 15 years,' " he said.
"They would ask about political movements there, and I had to say,
honestly, that I had no idea what they were talking about." The
questions were related to radical Islamist groups, and Mohammed said
these groups all formed after he'd left Algeria.

He said he was jailed in Cuba with two men he used to commute to
work with in Pakistan, men with whom he was seen every day teaching at
school and who, like him, were subjected to occasional home searches as
refugees.

The interrogators asked him what he was doing in Pakistan, and he
said he'd responded that he'd become a refugee there because he didn't
want to return to Algeria. The fact that he'd abandoned Algeria, he
thinks, raised suspicions. He said he had "personal security" fears in
Algeria, fears that he said had nothing to do with international
terrorism and that he refused to discuss. They involve death threats in
a personal feud. His fear is great enough that he won't return even
today, and he uses only Abu Mohammed as his name to protect the safety
of his wife and children.

He originally fled because of war, he said, and he can't imagine why
people think that he fled a war at home to search out other wars abroad.

He now lives in Albania, a country he'd never dreamed of visiting before the U.S. packed him off there in November 2006.

He said that Guantanamo officials had promised him a home, a place
where he could bring his family and start a new life in Europe's
poorest nation.

Instead, he said, he's in a land where there's no work and where he
isn't allowed to work. He has no hopes of ever being able to provide a
home and education for his children. There's an Arabic-language school
in Tirana, but being able to pay the $65 monthly tuition per child is
more than he can hope for here, he said.

"My life here? I wake in time to go to breakfast at the refugee center," he said. "That's my life. There is nothing more."